New life for American masters at Met museum

Get ready to fall in love all over again -- with John Singer Sargent, Winslow Homer, Frederic Edwin Church, Frederic Remington and other masters of American art.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art is opening its understated but elegant new American Wing for paintings, sculpture and decorative arts on Monday after a four-year renovation.

The collection, covering works from the 18th to the early 20th century, shines as never before.

For the first time, the works are displayed on one floor, chronologically and thematically, in a modern interpretation of the classic European Beaux-Arts picture gallery.

There are 26 rooms featuring coved ceilings, cornices and natural light from skylights in 18 of the galleries.

The new galleries mark the completion of a $100-million, three-part renovation of the American Wing that began 10 years ago.

New galleries dedicated to American neo-Classical arts opened in 2007 and the period rooms and light-filled Charles Englehard Court atrium with its monumental sculptures and Tiffany glass windows reopened in 2009.

"They are so elegant, stately and serene that they almost make one speak in a whisper," Morrison Heckscher, chairman of the American Wing, said of the galleries, designed by New York architects Kevin Roche John Dinkeloo & Associates.

The "wow" moment comes as soon as visitors walk in.

Standing under a huge gilded eagle in flight carved by William Rush, they can follow its gaze 150 feet down several galleries, and land their eyes on what is perhaps the most iconic of all American paintings: "Washington Crossing the Delaware" by Emanuel Gottlieb Leutze.

The redesign added 3,300 square feet of gallery space, but Heckscher emphasized that "the key here is not the number of pictures on view, but the quality."

While the old galleries worked well for large-scale modern art, Heckscher said, they were less suited for most of the museum's smaller paintings, and did not offer the vistas through doorways into other galleries.

During the renovation, the museum also checked on the condition of all the paintings and replaced dozens of frames.

"The frames are a huge part of the story," Heckscher said. "Though the architecture is restrained and low-key, the frames come on very strong and they are what draws one to the pictures."